Can My Parent Qualify for Medicaid in New Jersey?

This is part of a series of posts, published on Tuesdays, regarding Medicaid and elder law topics of general interest in New Jersey.

The answer to this question is complex, but given a little help from these posts, and hopefully some consultation with a good elder law attorney, we will be able to sketch out what is needed so your parent can qualify for Medicaid (also known as “Medicaid Only”) services for medical care in New Jersey. Eligibility for Medicaid for seniors has two facets financial and medical. The medical factors are usually handled by the facility itself, and require paperwork to be filled out by medical personnel (who again are typically employed by the facility). The financial factors are of course within the control of the applicant and his/her family, and we will be discussing them in great detail in future posts.

The baseline rule is that a Medicaid recipient can only have $2,000 in what are called “countable assets.” That number is preposterously low for the vast majority of New Jersey residents, and the key to making that number more palatable is to determine what is “countable.” Medicaid planning is, at its most basic level, the art of converting “countable” assets to “non countable assets,” exempting as much as possible from the grasp of the Medicaid program. Future posts will discuss what “countable assets” are, what exceptions there are to those rules, and how a skilled attorney can start to use those exemptions to a client’s advantage.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 17:06 and is filed under Elder Law, Healthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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